There are two big levers:

1. Be the only choice in your market. Have a really strong strategy – be clear on your niche, create something distinctive, say no to the wrong work
2. Run the machine better than anyone else. Great execution – be better at extracting profit from the same product/service – better systems / data / ops)

Big firms can afford to buy both. Most small firms have to choose which to focus on, and often firms don’t even make a choice, they just drift along doing the work and trying to fix things when they fail catastrophically. That’s how you end up overwhelmed.

Choosing the strategy path means narrowing your market to the point that, in an ideal world, you have no competition. You’re effectively the monopoly in a small market/specific type of client. This can be intellectually difficult as you need to do lots of brainstorming and thinking to decide where to focus your efforts, and also emotionally hard as to do this you’ll have to turn down lots of work to focus on the niche. Doubly hard when it’s your baby.

The operational excellence side is hard because it’s often complex, usually time consuming and frankly, not very sexy. Nobody wakes up in the morning fired up about fixing a process map, but that’s where the profit’s hiding.

It’s not a binary decision, you don’t need to max out both. You just need to be clearly better than your competition on one axis and not rubbish at the other.

There is another factor in play though: marketing. Strategy and execution are how you control how. Your business runs, marketing influences the customer perception, and at the end of the day, perception is what matters in terms of selling what you do.

Marketing has the ability to amplify – and occasionally disguise – where you are on that 2×2, it has the power to turn your internal strengths into external leverage, or push you to failure faster.

All three at the same time = Rare. Growth rocket

Great strategy + no marketing = secret genius, you’ll probably go out of business unless word of mouth can kick in before your cash flow stalls

Strong ops + no marketing = efficient but invisible, limping along for ages but never particularly successful

Great marketing + weak delivery = great initial success, then churn, reputational damage and failure

 nathan@nbstrategy.co.uk.